Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [13]
No visual, no aural, no olfactory memories at all. Only that neutral knowledge of what had been.
The sense of something forgotten tugged at his mind, but when he reached for it, it evaporated like light on water.
“Belsavis is on the edge of the Senex Sector, too,” he went on after a moment. “So it’s within striking distance of Yetoom. What’s the name of the valley where they built the dome? Do you know, Cray?”
“There’s two or three domed volcanic valleys in the glaciers,” said Cray, seeing Leia’s inquiring frown. “The domes are standard light-amp with apex-mounted antigrav systems to take the stress. Brathflen Corporation built the first one twelve or fourteen years ago over Plawal …”
She paused, as if hearing the word for the first time. “Plawal.”
“Plettwell,” said Leia. “Plett’s Well.”
“How long have colonies been there?”
Leia shook her head. “We’ll ask Artoo. At least twenty-five or thirty years. The Ninth Quadrant’s pretty isolated; the systems there are far apart. It would be the ideal place for the Jedi Knights to hide their families, once they knew the Emperor was out to destroy them.”
She straightened, the folds of her tabard falling into shimmering sculpture about her. “They hid the children in the well,” she repeated. “And after that they scattered, and didn’t even remember who they were.”
Leia frowned, a diplomat again. “Belsavis is an independent ally of the Republic,” she said. “They keep pretty tight security there because of the vine-coffee and vine-silk, but they should let me in to have a look at their records. Han and I can get the Falcon from Coruscant and be back before we were due home from the Time of Meeting. It’s supposed to be beautiful there,” she added thoughtfully. “I wonder if the children—”
“No!” Luke caught her sleeve, as if to physically stop her from taking her children; both Leia and Cray regarded him in surprise. “Don’t take them anywhere near that place!”
The next moment he wondered why he’d spoken, wondered what it was that he feared.
But all that remained was a sense of something wrong, something evil—some vision of blackness folding itself away into hiding …
He shook his head. “Anyway, if there’s folks like Drub McKumb there, it’s not someplace you want to take the kids.”
“No,” said Leia softly, seeing again—as Luke saw—the groaning figure strapped to the diagnostic bed, the jarring reds and yellows of agony on the monitor screens. “We’ll be careful,” she said quietly. “But we’ll find them, Luke. Or we’ll find where they went.”
The muted radiance of the sun-globes caught the flicker of her robes as she passed beneath the pillars and out into the luminous velvet of the Ithorian night.
Chapter 3
Tatooine.
The iron cold of the desert night; the way the darkness smelled when the wind died. Luke lay staring at the low adobe arch of the ceiling of his room, barely visible in the small glow of the gauges on the courtyard moisture condenser just outside his window …
Small, comforting clicks and whirrings came from the household machinery: Aunt Beru’s yogurt maker, the hydroponics plant Uncle Owen had set up last year, the hum of the security fence …
Why did the night feel so silent?
Why did his chest hurt with a terror, a sense of some malevolent enormity moving slowly through the dark?
He rose from his bed, taking his blanket to wrap around his shoulders. The stairs were tall for his short legs, the night air biting on his fingers. The desert smell made his nostrils itch, prickled on the skin of his face and lips.
He was very young.
At the top of the steps, above the sunken court of the farmstead, the desert lay utterly still. Huge stars stared from the absolute black of the sky with the wide-open glare of mad things, deeply and